God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  The wooden houses petered out. So did the sidewalk. The street broadened. Cars rushed past him, and Ananda had to walk carefully to avoid being run down.

  At the base of a long hill he stopped to rest, a little disturbed by the busy street. It was not the idyllic country road he had imagined.

  A car pulled over, wobbling to a stop. The left front tire was flat. The driver looked at Ananda and said, “Shit.”

  “Can I help you?” Ananda said politely.

  Jack Markey said, “Sure,” and grinned at him. He got out and opened the trunk and lifted out the spare. “You’re from somewhere else, right?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m from India. This is my first day in this country.” Ananda put down his suitcase, accepted the socket wrench, and looked at it doubtfully. He had never changed a tire in all his life.

  Jack looked at him and laughed. “Here, you twist off the lug nuts.” He took back the socket wrench and showed Ananda how. Ananda knelt and unscrewed them successfully while his new friend jacked up the front bumper.

  When the job was done, Jack Markey thanked Ananda and looked at him inquisitively. “I don’t suppose you’ve got time to do something else for me? Ten minutes, that’s all it’ll take.”

  Ananda hesitated, then said politely, “Well, I don’t see why I should not.”

  “Good.” Jack opened the car door and waved him onto the front seat. “It’s my assistant, he’s sick today, so I need somebody to hold the stick for me. I’m doing some surveying right here, just up the hill.”

  Ananda’s tiredness vanished. Henry Thoreau too had been a surveyor. He beamed at this reincarnation. “I would be most happy.”

  The car whizzed around in a U-turn and started up a broad drive. “This is the high school,” said Jack. “We’ll park the car and walk up. You can leave your suitcase on the seat.”

  Ananda soon found himself standing on a playing field at the top of a wooded ridge, holding a long graduated stick while the man with the curly yellow hair peered through a telescope mounted on a tripod and shouted at him to stand a little to the left, a little to the right. Through the trees Ananda could see a broad highway. Cars flooded by, trucks made huge accelerating noises. Below him people were playing tennis. “Up to the net, Jarvis,” shouted the coach. “Get a move on, Kenny, get a move on.”

  “Great, great,” said Jack, looking up from his telescope. “Now, hey, how about standing over there in front of that tree?”

  Ananda moved quickly to the tree and held the stick again. He couldn’t admit that he was in a hurry. It would be impossible to explain that after flying ten thousand miles he couldn’t wait another moment to see Walden Pond. Obediently he moved from place to place, wondering why the surveyor was mapping this bit of countryside so close to the sacred water. Was it a geodetic survey? Perhaps the map would show flora and fauna or the nature of the geological substratum.

  At last the yellow-haired surveyor was satisfied. “Gee, thanks. You’re a real sport.”

  “It was no trouble. May I ask what sort of cartographic study you are making?”

  “Cartographic?” Jack Markey looked at the skinny foreign kid in surprise. “Oh, we’re not mapping anything. We’re planning a shopping mall. You know, with a condo complex on the side. Grandison Enterprises. I work for Jefferson Grandison.”

  Ananda was dismayed. “But is it not too near to Walden Pond?”

  “Walden Pond?” Jack grinned. “Oh, you mean because of the book. There’s a book called Walden Pond.”

  Ananda began to explain, but a backhoe came up noisily beside them, and his words were drowned out. Jack went up to the driver. “You see those orange sticks? Dig there, and there, and there.”

  Ananda walked back to the car with a sinking heart. Extracting his suitcase, he continued his pilgrimage.

  In a moment he stood at a highway intersection. A huge eighteen-wheeler thundered past him, and then another and another. The high scream of the colossal tires rose above the immense roar of the diesel engines grinding into gear.

  Confused, Ananda misunderstood the traffic light. Dodging across from one lane to the next, he forgot to look left instead of right and was nearly run down. The furious driver blasted his horn and shouted at him.

  Shaken, Ananda hurried along the granite curbing on the other side while another tide of cars rushed toward him along the secondary road, plunging up to the stoplight, surging around the corner, and speeding in the direction of Boston.

  Then Ananda’s steps faltered. What was that vast hole, that enormous pit gouged out of the landscape?

  Stumbling up to the fence, he stared in horror at the Concord landfill, gaping at the distant mountain of trash and the muddy hollow with its pile of old washing machines rising skyward, interspersed with crumpled stoves and bent refrigerators. Heavy machinery was parked on a hilltop. A couple of giant dumpsters glittered with broken glass.

  Turning away, Ananda tottered back along the road, looking for a glint of blue water, that “perfect forest mirror, the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no guile.” It was nowhere in sight. Instead he came upon a trailer park. A swinging metal sign read “Pond View.” Behind it boxy dwellings were parked at angles to one another, white and turquoise.

  An old man sat on an aluminum lawn chair beside the road and stared at Ananda as he trudged by. Ananda gave him a feeble smile.

  Another foreigner, decided Stu LaDue, looking back at him coldly. Christ, they were everywhere, like cockroaches.

  5

  “There, marriage is like that.” (Thoreau, kicking a

  skunk cabbage)

  Frank Preston Stearns

  Julian and Alice Snow had lived at Pond View for thirty years. They had been married for thirty-two. By now you’d think they’d be used to each other, but they weren’t. Their long union had rubbed them both raw, and the rough places chafed and chafed, scouring bleeding grooves.

  Why had they stayed married so long? In the daytime, exasperated, Julian wondered why. In bed at night he didn’t wonder, although it wasn’t sex that kept them together. Sex was only another reason for irritation. It was their two warm bodies lying closely enfolded all night long, every night, year in and year out. In the dark their outer selves fell away, leaving only the deepest core. Clinging together in sleep, they forgot their bitterness, their fuming resentment.

  But now it was daytime. It was the end of Julian’s vacation. He didn’t enjoy vacations. He felt trapped. Alice was too much of a muchness. Lying there in bed—Alice was an invalid—she never stopped talking and eating and spilling crumbs and laughing and crying and crocheting and giving orders and picking fights and wanting things. God, how Alice wanted things. She was always ordering useless gimcracks from catalogs, although Julian railed at her that they couldn’t afford it. Next thing he knew, something else would arrive in a United Parcel van, a monogrammed doormat, a skirt for the bathroom sink, a hideous lamp with a ruffled shade, a furry blue scatter rug.

  For himself Julian wanted nothing. His job at the landfill next door was just a job, but it was all right. He pumped out the leaching tank, he operated the Trashmaster, the big roller that flattened the rubbish, and sometimes he ran the crawl dozer that buried everything in dirt. On weekends when Alice agreed to spare him, he took his boat out on Walden Pond and fished for trout. Or else he descended the steep slope of the kettle hole behind his mobile home and looked for waterfowl in Goose Pond.

  This morning Alice said she needed him. But whatever it was she wanted, it had to wait. A bunch of her friends dropped in and sat around her bed and billowed over into the kitchen, helping themselves to coffee, passing around their homemade goodies, talking loudly while Alice’s television chattered in the background. Then they all stopped talking to watch the next episode of “The Young and the Reckless,” which was everybody’s favorite. Julian, cramped into a corner of the kitchen with the morning paper, heard the sudden quiet as Vanessa confronted Dirk with his infidelity, and Dirk said, “I hoped and
prayed my relationship with Angelica would not become a factor here,” and Vanessa screamed at him.

  Julian stood up and looked out the window, staring at Goose Pond. Somebody was down there, tramping around, a big guy in rubber boots, flailing around clumsily, batting at mosquitoes. What was he up to? Julian watched him while Vanessa sobbed, “You used me, you lied to me.”

  “Well, so long, Alice dear,” said Mavis when the program was over. Shirley left, too. Honey Mooney stayed, loyally cleaning up the kitchen, offering Julian a coconut brownie, at last fussing down the trailer steps with her bundle of leftovers.

  “Julian, hey, Julian,” Alice called from the bedroom. “Hey, listen, I want you should go to the store. I want some of that cookie ice cream, okay? And I need some more purple yarn from the dime store, okay? And get me some stamps, all right? I want to order something.”

  Julian was glad to get out of the house. His spirits rose like a kite, lifting free from Alice’s clutching fingers. Climbing into his Chevy Blazer, he took off up the driveway.

  As he slowed down to make the right turn onto the street, he was surprised to see Charlotte Harris run out of her house and wave at him. She must have been looking out her window. He waited as she ran nimbly across her pretty garden, holding up a white envelope. Without a word she dropped it into his open window and ran back.

  Stu LaDue was sitting beside the road as always, keeping an eye on everything and everybody. From under his visored cap his thick glasses flashed at Julian’s truck. Julian didn’t want to read Charlotte’s note under the prying gaze of that bastard, so he left it lying on the seat and drove across Route 2 to the center of Concord and parked behind the post office.

  Turning off the engine, he picked up the envelope and read the note.

  He read it three times. His eyes kept going back to the last line, “It’s just that I’ve always loved you.”

  Julian was touched and dismayed at the same time. What did Charlotte mean by “someday”? Someday after Alice died? Alice wasn’t about to die. Someday after he got a divorce? A divorce! Julian could imagine what people would say, “His wife got sick, so he divorced her.” Oh, that would be just great.

  And what about Charlotte’s husband, Pete? It was true that Pete was a nonentity and a slob, but so what? Julian couldn’t ruin Pete’s life. And yet—for a moment Julian allowed himself to imagine what it would be like to be married to Charlotte, to live with a woman like that.

  But it was impossible. Julian left the letter on the seat and went to look for Alice’s purple yarn. But he couldn’t get Charlotte out of his mind as he walked out. of the parking lot and into the dime store.

  Whoops, wrong store. This wasn’t Woolworth’s. It was some kind of fancy little shop selling perfume. A pretty girl with a fancy haircut was standing behind the counter, looking at him sharply.

  Julian went back out to the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. The dime store was gone. Instead there were three other shops with snappy hemispherical awnings. They all had magnificent hand-carved signs in gold leaf—Corporate Gifts, the Den of Teddies, the Parfumerie. There were expensive-looking crystal bottles in the window of the Parfumerie, a giant toy moose in the Den of Teddies, and a lamp shaped like a golf club in the window of Corporate Gifts. It was obvious to Julian that none of these stores could supply him with Alice’s yarn.

  At least the post office was still there. Julian walked down the street and found it just where it had always been.

  He had to stand in line to buy stamps. In front of him a couple of well-dressed women were discussing their winter vacations in the Caribbean. Julian Snow, who had never been to the Caribbean, couldn’t help overhearing them, and neither could the garage mechanic behind him or the old couple behind the mechanic who were living on a pension.

  “You might try Nassau next year,” said Mimi Pink, the woman with the weird hairdo and the football shoulders.

  “Roger and I are really mad about St. John,” said Marjorie Bland, who was entirely outfitted in lavender, from sporty sweatshirt to running shoes. “We had a little house on the shore, and the houseboys brought in our meals, and there were the nicest people in the next cottage. She was in my class at Sweet Briar.”

  Back at Pond View Charlotte Harris was already regretting her impulsive action. Oh, dear God, the letter was a dreadful mistake. But this morning something had boiled up inside her. How many times in her married life had Pete said the same good-bye—“Don’t take any wooden nickels”—when he left for work? How many times? But today it had set off something uncontrollable in Charlotte, something violent. She had snatched up a piece of paper and driven down the words with a smoking pen, and then, no sooner had she stuffed it into an envelope than she had seen Julian’s truck slowing down, preparing to turn out onto the street. Without stopping to think, in all the turmoil of her feelings, she’d run out and thrust the envelope at Julian through the window of the cab.

  She shouldn’t have done it. Watching the big vehicle lurch into a pothole as it turned out onto the road, Charlotte felt her heart lurch in the same way. What had she let loose on the world, what havoc had she wrought? Her letter might go on blundering through her life for years to come—and through Julian’s, Pete’s, and Alice’s. Oh, God, if only she could snatch it back. If only she hadn’t written it at all.

  6

  ADVANCE TO ST. CHARLES PLACE.

  IF YOU PASS GO, COLLECT $200.

  Chance card, Monopoly

  Mimi Pink left the post office and strolled up Walden Street, her high heels wobbling on the sidewalk, her eyes studying the shop windows. Her glance was proprietary. Mimi owned the Den of Teddies, the Parfumerie, and Corporate Gifts, and she was negotiating right now for properties on Main Street around the corner. She had an idea for another gift shop, the Unique Boutique, and she had acquired the franchise for a new Porcelain Parlor.

  Mimi was on her way to a business lunch with Jefferson Grandison’s first lieutenant, Jack Markey. It wasn’t their first meeting. The first had been initiated by Mimi, with her usual gift for grasping at opportunity.

  She had heard privately from Judy Bowman, the chairperson of the Concord School Committee, that Jefferson Grandison was conducting a feasibility study at the high school. “It’s the old lacrosse field,” said Judy, “right next to the highway. He can have it, as far as I’m concerned. We could certainly use the money.”

  Jefferson Grandison in Concord! Mimi had her reasons for being intrigued, and it didn’t take her long to get on board. “You need me,” she told Jack Markey. “I know the ropes. I know how things work in Concord. You don’t.”

  Jack had been a pushover. And in an unguarded moment, he had gone so far as to inquire about Pond View, the moribund trailer park. “I understand the occupants have only a life tenancy. How many of those old folks are left?”

  “Oh, hardly any. I mean, they’re all at death’s door. Trust me.” Jokingly Mimi flexed her hands over the table. Her long red fingernails raked the air. “I know this town.”

  Today they were discussing money. Mimi had already rendered important services, and it was time to get down to business. “Oh, I don’t want a fee,” she said modestly. “A percentage, that’s all I ask.”

  “A percentage?” Jack was outraged. “How much, for Christ’s sake?”

  They haggled. Mimi won her point. Jack got up from the table and said an angry good-bye.

  Mimi got up, too, and looked at him in triumph. “How’s your boss?” she said sweetly.

  “My boss? You mean Mr. Grandison?” Sullenly Jack picked up the check and turned away, leaving Mimi to pay the tip. “He’s okay, I guess.”

  “And his wife,” Mimi called after him, “how’s his darling wife?”

  Jack was not aware that Grandison had a wife. He looked back at Mimi and shrugged his shoulders.

  Mimi smiled and watched him go. Then she walked back up Walden Street to her favorite shop, the Parfumerie. “You can break for lunch now, Bonnie,” she to
ld the girl behind the counter.

  Nearly every day Mimi spent an hour or two in her perfume shop. She loved watching her manicured hands remove the crystal stoppers from the elegant bottles, she loved the heavy scents that hung in the air.

  A woman entered the shop, a fashionably dressed older woman with a hairstyle just like Mimi’s, cut close at the nape, bushing out above the ears. She knew just what she wanted. Mimi opened the little flask of Parisian perfume and stroked the woman’s wrist with the stopper.

  “Oh, but it’s so expensive,” the customer whispered, looking longingly at the pretty bottle.

  “Here, try this one, Odalisque. It’s a trifle warmer, don’t you think? A little exotic?”

  A heavy fragrance rose around them, enclosing them in the atmosphere of a seraglio in the Arabian Nights—while a mile away at Goose Pond a ray of sunshine slanted into the deep kettle hole and stroked the petals of a thousand blossoms on an elderberry bush. At once the blossoms opened and released their delicate scent into the June air, free of charge.

  Homer Kelly inhaled it gratefully as he lifted his boots out of the wet rim of the pond and began walking in the direction of the place where he had left his car.

  But then another sound rose above the steady hum of traffic, a woman’s shriek.

  It was very near, just up the slope, where one of the mobile homes of Pond View was visible through the trees.

  And someone was crashing along the steep incline, heading away from Route 2. Homer could see the undergrowth shake, as though a gust of wind were running across the hillside. Small saplings and honeysuckle bushes waved to and fro.

  Slowly Homer began to climb the hill. “Hey,” he shouted, “what’s going on up there?”

  7

  … Walden, is it you?

  Walden, “The Ponds”

  Ananda Singh had lost track of himself. What was he doing here? His pilgrimage to Walden Pond was a failure. He had found the pond, he had seen the replica of Thoreau’s house in the parking lot, and he had walked down to the beach in a crowd of half-naked bathers. Then he had hiked along the beaten path to the place where Thoreau had lived for two years in a house he had built himself. The house was gone. There were stone markers and a sign. Four teenage boys were horsing around, pushing each other and shouting. Embarrassed, Ananda extracted from his suitcase the specimen of manganese from Jamshedpur and dropped it on the cairn of stones, a silent witness to the presence of a devotee from the other side of the world. Then he turned, exhausted, and found his way back to the road.